Garment Industry Oral History Collection

Title: Interview with Elmer Price and Lou Lesky
Description: Interview with Lou Lesky and Elmer Price about their experiences in the Kansas City garment industry. Lesky recalls his work at Kansas City Custom Garment Company, a men's clothing maker which switched to military uniform manufacturing during World War II, and uniforms for bus drivers, bakers, and other occupations post-war. Price discusses his white goods businesses in downtown Kansas City and later near 39th and Main. The men recall the Garment District of the past, noting other companies and individuals from the area, and talk about how much it has changed. They discuss the operations of their businesses and the decline of the textile and clothing industry in the United States.
Date: 2007-07-01
Object Type: Audio Recording

Title: Interview with Linda Lighton
Description: Interview with Linda Lighton about the history of the Woolf Brothers clothing stores, which he father worked at and later owned. She discusses the company's origins in the late 1800s, selling men's clothing and haberdashery at 1020 Walnut, and its expansion over the decades to locations at the Plaza, area malls, and regional cities, as well as expanding to sell women's clothing. She also discusses the life of Herbert Woolf, the Kansas City Jewish community, and says that she heard Herbert Woolf "discovered" actress Jean Harlow. She connects the decline of the business to the 1977 flood that damaged the Plaza store and her father Alfred being shot in a mugging, as well as the ascendance of clothing and department store chains in the 1980s.
Date: 2011-05-13
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Betty Brand
Description: Interview with Betty Brand about her family's history in and her experience with the Kansas City garment industry. Betty was married to Arthur Brand, whose family started the Brand and Puritz factory in 1928, and describes the family's experience in the garment business, the different suit and coat lines they manufactured, and the large number of immigrants among their staff. She also describes their experience in Kansas City's Jewish community, the retail and restaurant landscape of downtown Kansas City, and shares her paintings and photographs of her family and travels.
Date: 2010-11-15
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Skip and Leo Feingold
Description: Interview with Leo and Skipper Feingold about their lives and their experience in Kansas City's garment industry. The couple discuss Leo's military service, meeting through a friend while he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, and mention Skipper's early career tapdancing as part of the Luke Sisters. They also discuss their children's clothing business, Stevie Togs, Skipper's work as a teacher, and Leo's work for Stern-Slegman-Prins and Kap-Pel Fabrics.
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Alice Nast Statland
Description: Interview with Alice Nast Statland about her husband Nat Nast. She recounts her husband's history, their move to Kansas City, and his desire to go into the sport shirt business, and his later shift to specializing in bowling shirts. She discusses the business's popularity through the 1950s and '60s, and diversified into caps, jackets and other promotional apparel, and was sold by the family in the early '70s. The brand was revived as Nat Nast Luxury Originals menswear line by their daughters several decades later and garnered a lot of media exposure. She also notes that original Nat Nast shirts could command two to three hundred dollars at the time of the interview.
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Eugene Salvay
Description: Interview with Eugene Salvay about his life and his family's experience with the Kansas City garment industry, with additional information provided by his nephew, Craig Salvay. He discusses his childhood in the 1920s, and his education in aircraft engineering which lead to job in World War II working on B-25s at the assembly plant in the Fairfax District in spite of antisemitism in the hiring process. He recalls his father's work as designer at Fashionbilt before moving on to mail-order company National Bellas Hess, and operating his own business designing custom coats. He also shares stories about his family roots in Lithuania, his Jewish identity and ancestry, and meeting Harry Truman in the 1930s. Salvay also mentions his participation in developing Israeli aviation and his relationship with Moshe Arens.
Date: 2011-06-04
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with M. Martin Unger
Description: Interview with Martin Unger about his life and experience in the Kansas City garment industry. He discusses his family, his immigration to the United States from Germany in 1939, his experience in tailoring, and his interest in designing women's clothes. He recalls working as a designer in New York for 41 years until coming to Kansas City to work for ladies' coat and suit manufacturer Youthcraft, and discusses the decline of the local and domestic clothing industry, attributing the change to overseas manufacturing and the rise in big box chain retail. His wife, Ann Unger, also shares memories, and the couple shares photographs of their family and examples of Martin's designs.
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Ralph and Ben Zarr
Description: Interview with brothers Ralph and Ben Zarr about their lives and experience working in Kansas City's garment industry. They recount their father's and uncles' backgrounds in the garment business, their father's founding of the Quality Hill Dress Company, which made two-piece dresses for size flexibility, their start in the business as traveling salesmen, and the company's practice of adapting best-selling designs by other companies from previous seasons into two-piece dresses. They also discuss changes in fashion, overseas manufacturing, and labor union demands as factors in the decline of their business and the local industry, and share memories of seeing one of their dresses in a movie, having a racially diverse group of employees, future business dealings, and downtown businesses of the era.
Date: 2005-01-26
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Bob and Bruce Gershon
Description: Interview with Bruce and Bob Gershon about the history of their family company, Arrowhead Fabricare Services. They discuss the building's construction at the corner of 39th and Troost, salvaging furs and leather goods from Plaza stores after the 1977 flood, their garment company clients, a venture into hat-making, and share stories about their lives, families, and the dry-cleaning business.
Date: 2009-10-24
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: SC229 Garment Industry Oral History Collection Finding Aid
Description: This collection contains DVDs and transcripts that were created as part of a Kansas City Garment Industry History Project. The collection consists of oral history interviews and supplemental audiovisual materials related to the Garment Industry.
Date: 1938/2020
Object Type: Finding Aid

Title: Interview with Barbara Bloch
Description: Interview with Barbara Bloch about her family's history in the Kansas City garment industry. She discusses her family history in the business, sewing in the factory at 12 years old, and entering the restaurant uniform business by selling aprons to Kelly's Bar in Westport. She discusses the growth of that venture, her later work in direct sales of high-end clothing and accessories, and later opening Her Majesty's Closet, a luxury consignment store in Prairie Village, Kansas. She also notes new and remaining people in the local garment industry, as well as describing the business of operating her consignment store, and they discuss the prevalence of Jewish business owners in the industry.
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Cy and Esther Rudnick
Description: Interview with Cy and Esther Rudnick about their lives and their store, Cy Rudnick's Fabrics. Cy recalls coming to Kansas City to manage Kaplan's Fabrics and later operating his own store in Crown Center from 1976 to 2006. They discuss fabric buying, custom clothing, and notable customers, and sewing becoming a creative outlet rather than a necessary task. They also discuss the prevalence of Jewish families in the fabric business and their disinterest in shifting their business online.
Date: 2010-09-28
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Marshall Gordon
Description: Interview with Marshall Gordon about his family's experience in the Kansas City garment industry. His father, Hyman Gordon, operated the Frances Gee Company, manufacturing inexpensive housedresses during the Depression and World War II, later shifting to manufacturing uniforms. Marshall discusses working at the family business from 1960 to 1972, and returning after his father passed away in the early 1990s. He discusses their shift to manufacturing in Puerto Rico and Japan, the decline of the company, their relationship with the garment workers' union, as well as their real estate holdings and development work.
Date: 2005-08-04
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Ann Brownfield
Description: Interview with Ann Brownfield about her experience as a designer Kansas City and other Midwestern cities. She recalls her start designing shoes in St. Louis, later teaching pattern-making in Grand Island, Nebraska, and working in sportswear, coat, and suit design at Brand and Puritz after moving to Kansas City in 1960. She describes opening her own factory in Kansas City, Kansas, designing and sewing small collections for a variety of clients, including making warm-up suits for the 1972 US Olympic ski team; and her later closure due to the decline of skilled sewing machine operators. She also discusses the decline of the local industry, manufacturing moving overseas, and later working in retail, giving tours of the old garment district, and beginning to collect clothing and other items from local manufacturers.
Date: 2005-11-14
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Harvey Fried
Description: Interview with Harvey Fried about his life and about the Kansas City garment industry. Fried describes the early start of the local garment industry in the West Bottoms, with the buildings in the downtown Garment District built between approximately 1898-1915, and notes Kansas City's position as a rail hub in the center of the country as being key to manufacturing and distribution. He also recounts his parents' backgrounds, his father opening the Fried-Siegel Company in 1930 and Style Line Manufacturing Company in 1939, and the companies' role producing a wide assortment of apparel. He discusses the work of garment manufacturing and distribution in detail, the predominance of Jewish ownership in the industry, and the evolution of the Fried-Siegal and Style Line into smaller firms alongside the shrinking of the local and national garment industries. He also discusses the evolution of the Garment District neighborhood to the present and shares photographs.
Date: 2004-12-22
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Hal Hardin
Description: Interview with Hal Hardin about his history working in Kansas City's garment industry. He discusses the origin of the Donnelly Garment Company, his experience serving in the Mediterranean during World War II, his early life and work, and his start with the Donnelly company in 1952. He describes his beginning in advertising and his later work in sales, ultimately becoming their national sales manager. He also discusses his work with stores across the country; their plants in North Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Nevada, Missouri; their clothing lines and sales territories; and staying with the company until it shut down in 1978. He then opened a new manufacturing company which he operated until selling in 1990.
Date: 2005-02-14
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Mel Mallin
Description: Interview with Mel Mallin about his experience with the Kansas City garment industry. He discusses his start in New York, his work with Maurice Coat Company in Kansas City in the 1950s, and his later purchase of the All Packaging Company box business and the Manhattan Sponging Works in the late 1960s, a fabric processing company. He shares stories about changing size labels on clothing to flatter customers, the majority Jewish ownership of local garment companies, and recounts other local garment manufacturers and designers, their specialties, and their owners and operations. He also discusses the later conversion of the Garment District buildings into offices and apartments, including including his own 1983 conversion of his box and packaging plant into the first residential loft building in Kansas City.
Date: 2004-10-19
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Rose Stolowy
Description: Interview with Rose Stolowy about her life and her family's experience in the Kansas City garment industry. She recounts her husband Saul's immigration to the United States from Poland, his background in tailoring and design, and his work for and later ownership of Kansas City Custom Garment Company. She notes famous clients including Harry Truman, Nelson Rockefeller, and Kansas City Police chief and FBI director Clarence Kelley, and recalls starting her own fabric business, Midtown Fabric Shop, at 39th and Troost. She also recounts meeting and marrying Saul, and says that he helped Truman enter the haberdashery business.
Date: 2005-02-03
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Eddie Jacobs
Description: Interview with Eddie Jacobs about his life and experience in the Kansas City garment industry. He recalls his family history, including his parents' immigrations from Poland and Russia, and starting out in the garment industry with his father and brother manufacturing children's clothes. He discusses their later transition into maternity wear, selling to department stores and mail order businesses, and also notes he opened fabric stores with his mother-in-law. He also discusses their relationship with the garment workers union, describes their staff and their small-town manufacturing, and notes that they once made up about 20% of the maternity wear market before closing in the 1980s. He shares photographs and notes maternity wear design elements.
Date: 2005-01-06
Object Type: Video Recording

Title: Interview with Sherman Dreiseszun
Description: Interview with Sherman Dreiseszun about his life, his work in the Kansas City garment industry, and other ventures. He was the first of his family born in the United States after his parents and siblings migrated to Kansas City from the Polish-Russian border and later served as gunner in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He later owned the Vic-Gene Manufacturing Company with his nephew Frank Morgan, which he described as manufacturing knock-offs of popular garments including Pendleton jackets and corduroy "slick shirts." He and Morgan later opened Metcalf South Shopping Center in Overland Park,
Date: 2004-10-05
Object Type: Video Recording

Garment Industry Oral History Collection

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